Wingrove worked in the banking industry for 7 years until he became fed up with it. He then attended the University of Kent, Canterbury, where he read English and American Literature.

He is married and, with his wife Susan, has four daughters Jessica, Amy, Georgia, and Francesca.

Between 1972 and 1982 he wrote over 300 unpublished short stories and 15 novels.

He started work on a new fictional project called A Perfect Art. Between 1984 and 1988, when it was first submitted, the title was changed twice, becoming first A Spring Day at the Edge of the World and then finally Chung Kuo, under which title it was sold to 18 publishers throughout the world. The Chung Kuo series ran to eight of nine planned volumes before the series was cancelled and the author had to prematurely finish the story in the eighth volume, which both he and readers found unsatisfying.

In 2008 Nicolas Cheetham at Quercus Publishing bought the rights to the series and planned an ambitious reprinting and repackaging of the sequence, 'recasting' it as eighteen shorter novels (including a radically re-written finale) and an all-new prequel novel, provisionally entitled When China Comes. Quercus abandoned the project after Cheetham left, but Cheetham reacquired it for his new publishers, Corvus Atlantic in 2009. The reissuing of the series was planned to run from September 2010 to May 2014, commencing with the prequel novel, now retitled Son of Heaven. However, this was followed by news of a delay to Spring 2011 and the addition of a second prequel novel, Daylight on Iron Mountain.

Wingrove also has plans for further novels, including a first person character novel called Dawn in Stone City set in the Chung Kuo setting. He is also working on three very different novels, The Beast with Two Backs, Heaven's Bright Sun and Roads to Moscow.

Chung Kuo

Original publication sequence (1989-97):

1. The Middle Kingdom (1989)
2. The Broken Wheel (1990)
3. The White Mountain (1991)
4. The Stone Within (1992)
5. Beneath the Tree of Heaven (1993)
6. White Moon, Red Dragon (1994)
7. Days of Bitter Strength (1995)
8. The Marriage of the Living Dark (1997)

'Recasting' publication sequence (2011-14, planned):

1. Son of Heaven
2. Daylight on Iron Mountain
3. The Middle Kingdom
4. Ice and Fire
5. The Art of War
6. An Inch of Ashes
7. The Broken Wheel
8. The White Mountain
9. Monsters of the Deep
10. The Stone Within
11. Upon a Wheel of Fire
12. Beneath the Tree of Heaven
13. Song of the Bronze Statue
14. White Moon Red Dragon
15. China on the Rhine
16. Days of Bitter Strength
17. The Father of Lies
18. Blood and Iron
19. King of Infinite Space
20. The Marriage of the Living Dark

Myst

• The Book of Atrus (Cyan / Hyperion)
• The Book of Ti'ana (Cyan / Hyperion)
• The Book of D'ni (Cyan / Hyperion)

Other

• the Trillion-year Spree